Whitney Museum of American Art
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson
Whitney Museum of American Art
About the Project
The inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission, entitled Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) will be on view on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace from March 20, 2024, through February 2, 2025, as a part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
The unveiling of Torkwase Dyson’s new work for the Hyundai Terrace Commission marks the beginning of a 10-year partnership between Hyundai Motor and the Whitney, announced earlier this year. Dyson presents an installation that is meant to be activated by visitors. Described by Dyson as a “monastic playground,” Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) invites visitors to touch, sit on, and experience the work in a tactile way. This prompt speaks to Dyson’s conviction that liberation can be found at every register of movement: “freedom is an ongoing spatial question of motion and imagination.”
Dyson composes geometries on an architectural scale using light and space as formal building blocks. Together, the monumental arcs, implied gestures, and surrounding natural light articulate changing abstract shapes over the course of each day and night. For Dyson, the intertwining of abstraction and Blackness is a central philosophical concern that came out of an interest in public infrastructure. The relationships between ecology, belonging, and personal history take on new meaning with the terrace’s view of the Hudson River and the museum’s location in one of New York City’s most vulnerable flood zones, along the West Side Highway and near the water’s edge.
The inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission is being launched in line with Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, which will be open from March 20 to August 11, 2024. The 2024 Biennial is a thematic exhibition focusing on ideas of “the real” to acknowledge that, today, society is at an inflection point, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Many of the artists presenting works explore the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines.
About the Artist
Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies. Dyson builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes, building surface, and configuring minimal geometric elements that lend a productive tension between image and object. The paint-handling producing various visual qualities using brushwork and other tools is made poetic by a juxtaposition of delicate marks and scored diagrammatic lines. This compositional rigor imbues the works with an architectural presence and optical gravity. Dyson considers spatial relations an urgent question both historically and in the present day. Through abstract paintings, Dyson grapples with ways space is perceived and negotiated. Explorations of how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through natural and built environments become both expressive and discursive structures within the work.
About the Program
Hyundai Terrace Commission
The annual Hyundai Terrace Commission gives artists and curators a platform to present site-specific works on the museum’s fifth-floor terrace, as part of the Whitney’s 10-year partnership with Hyundai Motor. Artists are invited to create large-scale, experimental projects that enable them to test their aspirations, incubate their creativity, and respond to the space and the neighborhood. During the years of the Whitney Biennial (every two years), the fifth-floor terrace space will feature the commissioned work of an artist for the Hyundai Terrace Commission in conjunction with the larger Biennial exhibition.
Take a Closer Look
Editorial Article
Play as Liberation: Exploring Torkwase Dyson’s Monastic Playground
Editorial Video
Whitney Biennial 2024 in 60 seconds
Editorial Video
Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing
Editorial Video
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Torkwase Dyson: Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground), Artwork in Focus
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